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After eating well in Australia, David Whitley has nobly decided to help you do so as well…

In terms of gap between perception and reality, few countries are more misjudged for their food than Australia. In fact, there’s a strong argument to say that Australia has the best food scene in the world – particularly when it comes down to sheer variety of what’s available. But to the uninitiated, Australian menus can throw up a few curiosities. Here are a few things to look out for…

Burger/ sandwich

These basically act as burgers or sandwiches do pretty much anywhere, apart from one key ingredient, which is often slipped on matter-of-factly despite not being mentioned in the menu description. This ingredient is the beetroot slice and it’s guaranteed to ruin the taste of whatever you’re eating with such totality that the addition of it is technically illegal under the Geneva Convention.

Meat pie

Australian pies, when compared to their grotesque British chip shop counterparts, are usually of pretty good quality. They’re a national source of pride, but the occasional duffer slips in. The secret to picking a good one is to look at how specific the description is. If specifies the meat, it’ll probably be lovely. If it just says “meat”, stay well away – you probably don’t want to know what’s in there.

Barramundi

It’s a big, meaty fish from the north of the country and it is almost uniformly excellent. Tick VG, just do it OK.

Sourdough

Australia operates a couple of years behind the rest of the world when it comes to trends, but once it spots one, it embraces it with such desperately pathetic enthusiasm that nothing else gets a look-in. Currently, therefore, absolutely everything comes “on sourdough”. Any café displaying an item not “on sourdough” is immediately shut down by the ultra-needy food fashion police.

“Smashed”

These same menus seem to be written by the Incredible Hulk. Everything in your breakfast, it seems, has to be “smashed”. That’s smashed eggs, smashed avocado, smashed potatoes, even “smashed browns”. Ask what it means, and you’ll be met with a sheepish shrug that basically means: “Something we’ve just broken up a bit.” Expect this to escalate in the coming years to “bludgeoned”, “hammered to fuck” and “annihilated”.

Golden Gaytime

Any Australian who claims not to love these biscuit-covered ice creams is probably an impostor. The name might elicit a double take, but no day with a Golden Gaytime consumed has been a bad day.

Sharing plates

Perhaps the most annoying over-embraced obsession is the complete takeover of “sharing plates”. To all intents and purposes, this means tapas but slightly bigger. The issue is that how much bigger is never really stated.

It can sometimes mean that a dish is half the size of a normal main course (but two-thirds the price) or it’s two-thirds the size of a main course (and exactly the same price as a main). So if you don’t actually want to share, you either end up getting the right amount of food (and paying one third more for it) or 50% more food than you really want at double the price.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the concept (apart from you end up paying more), but the utter domination of menus is incredibly tiresome. Sometimes you’ll have to go past five or six restaurants to find one that will give you what you want – one thing, done well, at a fair price.